Daily Creates – Bootcamp Week 2

“FALLin’ for UMW” is the title I chose for this Daily Create assignment. I took this picture last fall when my friend Grace and I were just walking around campus one Sunday afternoon. I really liked this picture because the brick path seems kind of winding throughout the picture and makes your eye follow it from the foreground to background and envelops you in the photograph. I thought this would be perfect because it shows to the web how beautiful our campus is!

For this Daily Create, I couldn’t really think of a nifty title, but it’s very simply put as “spinning nickel.” It’s so simple because that’s exactly what it is! I wanted to do something easy, but that would look cool, so I just spun a nickel on my desk and took a snapshot of it in action! And this is how it turned out

This was probably the most entertaining Daily Create of the week, as you can tell by my result. My friend Enisa and I were hanging out at her room and were just searching around for objects that would be silly as hats. And WABAM! We found a pot. So she put it on her head and I took the picture! It was fun trying to find something that would be funny/silly yet still work. I titled it “Mad Hatter” because who would put a red solo cup on their head?!

Creatively Uncommon

The Daily Creates were interesting this week, to say the least. Next were my thoughts on Creative Commons and what it’s all about. I thought the concept was really cool and innovative.

GIF TIMEEEE

Sooooo here is the big HURRAH! My first animated GIF and the digital storytelling assignment of the week:

HOLD MY POODLE WASSUP Y’ALL GOT A PROBLEM

It took me awhile to get started with this because I was very intimidated by this assignment because it wasn’t something I had ever done before. But once I had this amazing tutorial, I was able to relax a little (only a little) and focus on what I had to do. First, I downloaded Fastest YouTube Downloader in order to download the clip from the movie White Chicks that I wanted for my gif. Once I had that, I converted the YouTube video of my choice and converted it to a .mov file so that I would not only get sound, but also visual.

Next, I downloaded the MPEG Strteamclip program so I’d be able to trim the clip into the exact part that I wanted for my gif. Once this was installed, I opened the .mov file I converted from the YouTube video onto the MPEG Strteamclip program and trimmed it to the specific part I wanted. Next, I downloaded GIMP, an open source image editor. This enabled me to layer the images that I had trimmed for my gif and to save it as an animated gif. This was the coolest part because I got to see my gif work out just the way I had imagined it! So by following the instructions on the tutorial, I was able to complete and save my White Chicks gif!

Posting it onto my website was another thing though because I found another helpful tutorial, a video created by my professor, that helped me through this process. I published it to make sure it worked just so that I could see the whole process complete and it worked! So cool! Now I’m totally gonna make more……

 Blog Customization

This still hasn’t quite happened for me. I understand how to search for themes and such through Appearance –> Themes –> Install Themes, but they all appear the same to me and are all kinda boring. So once I finish this Weekly Summary, I think I’m gonna go back to that and keep trying and playing around with things. I just really wanted to complete Bootcamp Week 2 before I just fooled around with my site for awhile.

Semana Dos

Bootcamp Week 2 was definitely a lot easier and less stressful for me. Week 1 involved a lot of new and different things that we had to install and showed us all kinds of sources and places to read from to get our information. Like I said in my last Weekly Summary, that was all quite overwhelming. But now that I had more of a grasp on that stuff and I knew where to find all kinds of things on the ds106 website, I found I was more relaxed about getting things done.

Still looking forward to next week and I’m excited I’ve completed my Weekly Summary Sunday MORNING instead of Sunday NIGHT. What an accomplishment! But now I think I’ll go make some more gifs…